America's Failing Grade on Cyber Attack Readiness

Sean McGurk, a former DHS official who is now senior policy officer at the Industrial Controls Systems Information Sharing and Analysis Center, told a radio show in early June that he had already seen hackers modifying Stuxnet for their own uses. He also noted that as one of the most computer-reliant nations on the planet, the U.S. is also one of the most vulnerable.

"Because everything from elevators to prison doors are controlled by computers in our country, these systems lend themselves to manipulation and potentially to destruction," he said.

Since Stuxnet's discovery, cyber experts have found two other highly-sophisticated cyber weapons: Duqu, a cyber program built in the style of Stuxnet but for espionage rather than offensive operations, and Flame, the largest espionage program in history designed to capture any keystroke, image and conversation even near the infected system. Based on stunning similarities in the code of all three programs, researchers said they believe they were all created by either the same team, or at least teams of computer experts with access to each other's original work.